The Design Division at CCA welcomes Weiwei Au & Aosheng Ran as our first round of speakers in the 2022 Spring Design Lecture Series. These live lectures bring us together across time zones and disciplines as we meet leading designers, strategists, curators, and educators to speak about contemporary practice, discourse, and making. For the Spring 2022 Design Lecture Series we invite CCA alumni to share their design strategies and stories of success.
CCA Alumni Weiwei Xu (BFA Interaction Design 2018), Aosheng Ran (BFA Interaction Design 2020), and May-Li Khoe are the founders of Sprout, a virtual collaboration and social space that optimizes coziness. Their goals in creating the space range from bringing the energy of Nintendo to computers, to enabling coexistence within a community. Hosted by Studio Forward in partnership with Google, the Sprout team talk is a delightful entry into the spirit of interaction design. They don’t cover the coding of the space, but instead focus on guiding principles that form the emotional experience of users.
“The goal of creating Sprout was to make spaces digitally, where we feel like we belong,” says Shu. “I spent the first twenty years of my working life in meeting rooms that seemed to suck the life out of people,” shares Khoe. With a clear description of un-coziness, they set out to define what makes something cozy. As you might expect, cozy to them is intimate, warm, playful, “and, we have to be able to be vulnerable,” Ran adds. They were looking to make something that wasn’t driven by the architecture of the code, or by industry, but rather by the feeling we have while using it.
“It’s tempting to try to recreate some interaction we love in the real world. But it’s important to think about the attributes, and then build for the digital realm,” explains Khoe. Instead of recreating a digital bean bag, they needed to create the feeling of relaxed posture and freedom of movement.
There is a consistent warmth, fluidity, and generosity woven through how the team speaks, moves on the canvas, responds to questions and interacts with each other’s additions to the space real-time. “Social media has us comparing ourselves to others, but our best memories are more like potlucks,” says Xu. To create this kind of feeling where we create trust and share, the team settled on the guiding principles of focus transparency (your face and pointer/cursor are united), removing gatekeeping, and encouraging playfulness. “We rely on the humane parts of us to set the boundaries, not the software,” says Ran.
Built up, moved around, culled, and played on in real time, we watch with the team’s faces moving around the capybaras, videos of puppies, party hats, and ice cubes, giving us a real sense of the Sprout experience. The final canvas ends with the note that, “Sprout is a love letter to people who want to bring giggles to the world, and to the future of computing.”
Authored by Sarahleah Fordyce
23 июл 2023
